Tornado Cash
Olumide Adesina•Saturday, February 8, 2025•1 min read
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Alexey Pertsev, the creator of Tornado Cash, was released from prison in February. 7 and will continue to be under house arrest as he prepares to file an appeal.
Pertsev’s pretrial detention, which started in August 2022 and was prolonged in a previous court decision in November 2024, was halted by a Dutch court.
Pertsev is required to be electronically monitored as part of the pretrial release. In a social media post, the developer stated, “It is better than prison, but it is not real freedom.”.
Privacy advocates expressed alarm over Pertsev’s case, claiming a risky precedent for developers of immutable code and privacy-preserving technologies.
Pertsev was sentenced to five years and four months in prison after the’s-Hertogenbosch Court of Appeal found him guilty of money laundering in May 2024.
Dutch court officials still found Pertsev guilty even though the Tornado Cash software developers had no control over the money flowing through the protocol or the protocol itself.
Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Department of the Treasury.
Government regulator officials asserted that over $7 billion in illicit funds have been laundered through it Since the service’s launch in 2019,.
In addition, OFAC cited $455 million in funds that were allegedly laundered through Tornado Cash after being allegedly stolen by the notorious North Korean hacking group Lazarus.
The US Fifth Circuit Appeals Court declared in November 2024 that OFAC had overreached its congressional powers in authorizing Tornado Cash’s unchangeable contracts.

Olumide Adesina
Financial Market Writer
Olumide Adesina is a French-born Nigerian financial writer. He tracks, analyzes, and reports changes in financial markets with over 15 years of working experience in investment trading.